Kaldrek

What is Kaldrek like?

Kaldrek is the outer planet of Aurin, the system’s star. It is 6,400 km in radius.

• Gravity. 10.2 m/s², the highest of the four planets.
• Seasons. Its axis tilts 22°. That gives it the most marked seasons of the four planets.
• Sun. From here, Aurin is a pale disc half a degree across. For much of the year it sits low over the horizon.
• Air. Breathable, at 120 kPa: somewhat denser than on Ithera, the temperate planet.
• Sky. A high haze of aerosols (fine particles hanging in the air) tints it amber. At ground level the air is clean.
• Landscape. Glaciers and tundra on the plateaus. Alien boreal forests and moss meadows in the valleys. Fjords and frozen coasts.

At night it is not the star that gives light. It is the ring, an arc of ice that crosses the sky from side to side, and the glow of the geothermal valleys. That ring, known as the Anillos de Kaldrek, is what is left of Mornane, the moon Kaldrek lost.

The Registro Aura, the system’s first catalogue, marked it from afar with the suffix -ek: hostile. It did so for the glow of its fissures and its amber sky. The first landing found air beneath the haze.

Why is it so fertile, when it is so far out?

Kaldrek receives little more than a quarter of the light that reaches Ithera. But it has two sources of heat that Ithera lacks:

• Its dense air, which holds the warmth in.
• Its two moons, Renvar and Ordrek, which pull on it with their tides and knead it.

That pull has gone on for millions of years and keeps the planet’s interior hot. That is why the valleys are full of hot springs, geysers and fissures.

The result is two opposite climates:

• On the plateaus and the shaded slopes, ice rules.
• In the valleys, the ground stays mild all year and water does not freeze. The densest vegetation in the system grows there, and all the settlements are there too.

Against what you might expect, Kaldrek is the most fertile planet in Aurin.

Who is in charge here?

No one. Kaldrek is hard to tame. It has two opposite climates metres apart, violent seasons and a sky that does not let you see far. And neither of the two factions, the Zenith and the Nadir, has a real technological edge with which to prevail.

That is why the cold peace, the tense truce that followed the war of Year 1, is measured here in metres of valley. Both sides keep forward bases of deliberately equivalent size and capability. And The Vanguard, the Military Guild, escorts any side that pays.

	Zenith	Nadir
What Kaldrek is to them	Their main extraction target in the system. The loudspeakers of El Pináculo, their station, announce its quotas in real time.	The frontier where Zenith expansion has to be contained.
What brews here	Axioms leak out: decrees from their high command that no one should follow to the letter.	The Descarnados, their radicals, propose acts of sabotage. The Círculo, the assembly that governs the Nadir, neither authorises nor stops them.

Where is the fighting?

The contested valley is La Grieta Común. It is a rift, a great fracture the fissures opened across an ancient ringed impact basin. It lies at the same distance from both bases.

• The Bastión Ígneo is the Zenith base, fortified and vertical. It rises on one side, on a subglacial eruption mesa. That mesa is lava that forced its way beneath the glacier and cooled into flat basalt flows. It is also a deposit, with a band of neolith and technalite geodes.
• The Refugio de Ceniza is the Nadir base, on the opposite slope. It is dug underground and camouflaged. The two bases write the difference between the two houses in military architecture: the Zenith want to ascend; the Nadir, to take root.
• The Campo de Fumarolas Perpetuas lies between them. It gives The Forge, the producers’ guild, rare gases. And because it shows up badly on thermal sensors, it is good ground for ambushes.
• El Yunque is a partly metallic massif. It may be an asteroid fragment fused with the crust in an ancient impact. It holds heavy ore. Extraction teams from both sides fight over it under The Vanguard’s escort.

What is there to fear?

• Fissures and geysers. They open in predictable cycles, to the rhythm of the two moons’ pull. They force people to move in the middle of a fight.
• Gases near the fumaroles.
• Tremors that bring down trench lines.
• Extreme cold in the shaded valleys, a few metres from the hot springs.

What can you get here?

Three materials the shipyards need (see the resource guide):

• Núcleo de Piroclasto. It comes from the fissures. It is the only ship fuel cell in the system.
• Cristal Umbrío. It comes from the surface seams, baked by that same heat.
• Aleación Fría. It is refined from the other two.

So the shipyards of both sides depend on a planet neither of them controls. Quill Sarn, ‘El Ojo Ciego’, head of the Pathfinders, the explorers’ guild, reminds anyone who goes down to dig, over comms:

“Kaldrek isn’t going to ask which side you’re on before it shoots you. Grab what you need and get out before somebody decides your Cristal Umbrío is more interesting than you are.”

Quill Sarn, The Pathfinders